President Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman posed a “grave counterintelligence threat” due to his interaction with people close to the Kremlin, according to a bipartisan Senate report released Tuesday that also found extensive contacts between key campaign advisers and officials affiliated with Moscow’s government and intelligence services.
The Senate Intelligence Committee report states that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort worked with a Russian intelligence officer “on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election,” including the idea that Ukrainian election interference was of greater concern.
The report states that a Russian attorney who met with Manafort, the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and his son-in-law Jared Kushner at Trump Tower in 2016 had “significant connections” to the Kremlin. The information she offered to them was also “part of a broader influence operation targeting the United States that was coordinated, at least in part with elements of the Russian government,” the report states.
But the panel also found that the FBI’s handling of Russian threats to the election were “flawed,” and that the FBI gave “unjustified credence” to other allegations regarding Trump’s Russia ties that were made in a dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, “based on an incomplete understanding of Steele’s past reporting record.”
Read the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s three and a half year investigation stands as Congress’s only bipartisan examination of Russian interference in the 2016 election. But the panel’s leaders were noticeably divided along party lines in how they interpreted the significance of the report — particularly concerning Trump’s Russia contacts — a sign that their tome will likely not put to rest the political fights over its substance.
“We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election,” acting chairman Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in a statement Tuesday morning, though the acknowledged the “what the Committee did find however is very troubling” and included “irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.”
Vice Chairman Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), meanwhile, noted “a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections,” and he encouraged “all Americans to carefully review the documented evidence of the unprecedented and massive intervention campaign waged on behalf of then-candidate Donald Trump by Russians and their operatives and to reach their own independent conclusions.”
The committee’s past chairman Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who oversaw the bulk of the investigation, struck a position in the middle.
“One of the Committee’s most important — and overlooked — findings is that much of Russia’s activities weren’t related to producing a specific electoral outcome, but attempted to undermine our faith in the democratic process itself,” he said in a statement. “Their aim is to sow chaos, discord, and distrust. Their efforts are not limited to elections. The threat is ongoing.”
Isn't it amazing that two people can read the exact same thing and express completely contradictory conclusions about it? Depends on which bubble you live in.
I still think junior needs to be indicted. He clearly participated in a meeting with the expectation that he would be getting "dirt" on I-1's opponent. He said so in an e-mail. The fact that dirt was not delivered is irrelevant.
If you hold a gun to someone's head and pull the trigger, but the gun jams or someone slipped a blank in it when you thought it had a real bullet, you still get charged with attempted murder.
Not indicting him sets yet another very dangerous precedent.
